What Does It Mean to Have Enough?

In 2012, my daughter was fighting for her life in the NICU. I was at the hospital with my wife, without even 3000 INR ($30) in my pocket, wondering how we would ever afford $8000 in hospital bills. I cried for days and felt helpless.

For the past few months, I have seen many posts on social media about how much money people want and how much money they have made. To be honest, there are people who made more money in their 20s than I have made in my entire career so far, and who have saved more money than I will probably save by the time I retire, but they still don’t have enough.

So I kept thinking: what does having enough mean to me?

Where I come from

I still remember how my room in the slums of Mumbai used to flood with sewer water, and how we sometimes went without electricity for a few days.

I also remember telling my friends as a teenager that I wanted to own a bike one day. Yes, that was my dream when I was around thirteen or fourteen.

Even after I started working, we lived paycheck to paycheck for years. I had to teach my daughter not to ask for gifts at the end of the month. It taught me to live within a budget. Buying something expensive meant waiting for months before we could afford it.

When wanting more becomes the problem

I was the same as those people on social media at one point in time. I wanted more, and I always wished I had enough.

You wish for a lot of things when you are a kid or young. You want to own the entire world, which is absolutely fine. Everyone should have dreams, and dreams made me successful in my life and career.

But how do you know when you have enough? I was reading the book The Psychology of Money, and it mentioned the story of Rajat Gupta, how he reached a stage where he had so much money, still wanted more, and ended up in jail for insider trading. I definitely didn’t want to be like him.

The first time we had enough

It was in 2019 that we started saving some money. For the first time in my life, we had some money left over after taking care of rent and our expenses.

The first thing I decided to do was increase the EMI (monthly loan payment) on one of my loans. I wanted to be debt free, as it was eating most of my savings.

Then 2020 happened. I found another job that paid more than my last one, left it within a few months, and started working as a consultant. I still remember receiving my first check and going, “holy shit, this is a lot of money for us”. My wife and I wondered what to do with all this money, and we decided to help others, because we knew how it feels to not have anything.

We realized we had reached a stage where we had enough for the family. We ended up sharing it with people who needed it during COVID, and we also paid off most of our loans.

I also realized that the boy from that flooded room in Mumbai had waited a long time for this day, the day his family could have a good life. All those years taught me the true value of having enough.

Starting from zero again

By the end of 2021, I had made some decent investments in India, but in January 2022 we decided to move to Germany. The family was separated for 10 months, thanks to German bureaucracy. My family was stuck in India while I was trying to figure out life in Germany. My savings in India were going down, I couldn’t find a house, and rent was eating most of my salary.

I still remember the day they joined me. I went to Hamburg Airport to pick them up, and I forgot how terrible the last 10 months had been. I was so relieved to see them in front of my eyes. I wanted to cry, but there were no tears. I was happy and felt like the richest person in the world.

At that moment I realized that not having money sucks, but not having your family with you sucks more.

After that, it took us more than a year to set up our home and buy every small thing we needed: beds, utensils, a TV, and so on.

We rebuilt our life together in a new country, starting from zero again.

By 2024, we had saved enough money to afford our first international vacation.

What enough means to me

I realized I can fight anything. I can start from zero as many times as life wants me to, but having my family by my side is what makes me feel that I have enough.

I don’t want to own a fancy car or a big house anymore. What I want is for my family to have a good life. Do I need a lot of money to do that?

Maybe yes, but if we are together, we can survive anything. We did it twice, once in India and once again in Germany, with my family by my side.

You might be asking, do I own a bike now? No. It’s not a necessity for me. I have leased a car, which is enough for our family, and only because public transport in my village isn’t great. Otherwise, I wouldn’t see a car as a necessity either.

I don’t have millions of dollars. I do hope to have them by the time I retire, not because I want them, but so I can keep giving back to the community.

For me, having enough means having my family by my side.